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Welcome New MCL Member Fenxiao Chen

We are so happy to welcome a new Ph.D. student, Fenxiao Chen, in Fall 2017. Let us hear what she said about her research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)
I worked on Cloud Computing and distributed systems before. I interned at Berkeley National Lab on DNA k-mer assembly and Artigen Corp on natural language processing.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?
First impression of USC is that it’s a school that welcomes a great range of diversity. MCL is the largest research group I have seen so far in the EE department. I like the researching environment that is not only encouraging but also inspiring.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?
I hope I can develop more expertise on natural language processing and deep learning. With the help of MCL I wish to bring my own contribution as well.

Welcome New MCL Member Harry Yang

We are so happy to welcome a new Ph.D. student, Harry Yang, in Fall 2017. Let us hear what he said about his research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?
My name is Chao “Harry” Yang, and I am a 2nd year Ph.D. student at the MCL lab in the department of computer science at USC. Prior to joining MCL, I was a PhD student at the computer graphics lab of USC. I received my Bachelor’s degree of mathematics in University of Science and Technology of China. I am interested in computer vision and deep learning, and previously I worked on research projects related to image inpainting and domain adaptation.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?
USC has a beautiful campus and a vibrant research environment. I love to walk in the campus seeing a lot of students and professors full of passion and energy. The MCL lab is a wonderful place with a caring and supportive advisor and a large group of young talented students. I feel more motivated and enthusiastic about my everyday research after joining MCL and I super enjoy the interaction with the professor and group members.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?
I want to make friends in MCL, do good research and write high-quality papers. I am really excited to be able to learn from everyone in the group. With so much help and support, I am looking forward to a great career ahead of me after finishing my study in MCL.

MCL Students Presented Papers at BMVC 2017

We would like to share the good news that our group has two papers accepted by BMVC 2017 from Qin Huang and Siyang Li. This year BMVC is more competitive than before, according to the conference committee. We are happy that our group successfully has two papers, especially with one as oral presentation.

“Semantic Segmentation with Reverse Attention”:
Obstruct: Recent development in fully convolutional neural network enables efficient end-to-end learning of semantic segmentation. Traditionally, the convolutional classifiers aretaught to learn the representative semantic features of labeled semantic objects. In thiswork, we propose a reverse attention network (RAN) architecture that trains the net-work to capture the opposite concept (i.e., what are not associated with a target class) aswell. The RAN is a three-branch network that performs the direct, reverse and reverse-attention learning processes simultaneously. Extensive experiments are conducted toshow the effectiveness of the RAN in semantic segmentation. Being built upon theDeepLabv2-LargeFOV, the RAN achieves the state-of-the-art mean IoU score (48.1%)for the challenging PASCAL-Context dataset. Significant performance improvementsare also observed for the PASCAL-VOC, Person-Part, NYUDv2 and ADE20K datasets.

“Multiple Instance Curriculum Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection”:
Obstruct: When supervising an object detector with weakly labeled data, most existing ap- proaches are prone to trapping in the discriminative object parts, e.g., finding the face of a cat instead of the full body, due to lacking the supervision on the extent of full objects. To address this challenge, [...]

Congratulations to Eddy Wu for Passing His Defense

Congratulations to Eddy Wu for passing his defense. His thesis title is “Deep Learning Techniques for Supervised Pedestrian Detection and Critically-Supervised Object Detection” with three major topics, as follow:

In the first topic, a boosted convolutional neural network (BCNN) system is proposed to enhance the pedestrian detection performance. Being inspired by the classic boosting idea, we develop a weighted loss function that emphasizes challenging samples in training a convolutional neural network (CNN). Two types of samples are considered challenging: 1) samples with detection scores falling in the decision boundary, and 2) temporally associated samples with inconsistent scores. Finally, we train a boosted fusion layer to benefit from the integration of these two weighting schemes. We test the corresponding BCNN on the Caltech pedestrian dataset in the experiment and observe a significant performance gain over the Fast-RCNN baseline.

In the second topic, a semi-supervised learning method is proposed for pedestrian detection in a domain adaptation setup. The proposed clustered deep representation adaptation (CDRA) method uses a small amount of labeled data to train an intial detector, extracts the deep representation and, then, clusters samples based on the space spanned by the deep representation. A purity measurement mechanism is applied to each cluster to provide a confident score to the estimated class of unlabeled data. Along with a weighted training approach, the CDRA method is shown to achieve the state-of-the-art performance against some large scale datasets.

In the third topic, we propose a new framework called critically-supervised learning that mimics children learing behaviors. Several novel components are proposed to fulfill the high level concept, including negative object proposal, critical example mining, and a machine-guided labeling process based on question answering. A labeling time model is proposed to [...]

By Yiyue Zhang|September 18th, 2017|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to Eddy Wu for Passing His Defense|

Congratulations to Qin Huang for Passing His Defense

Congratulations to Qin Huang for passing his defense. His Ph.D. thesis is entitled ‘Machine Learning Techniques for Perceptual Quality Enhancement and Semantic Image Segmentation’. His research focuses include designing effective deep neural network structures and representative feature representations for traditional machine learning solutions. After graduation, Qin will join Facebook as Research Scientist for full-time position. His advices to the group members is to work hard, think more, be modest.

By Yiyue Zhang|September 11th, 2017|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to Qin Huang for Passing His Defense|

Welcome Summer Intern Student Zhichao Huang

We are so happy to welcome a new summer intern student, Zhichao Huang, in Summer 2017. Let us hear what he said about his research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

I’m Zhichao Huang, a junior student from Tsinghua University, majoring Electronic Engineering. Although I came from EE department, the research that I have done is mainly in the field computer science. I have been working on the area of computer vision for about one year, focusing on face recognition, person identification and something like that. In addition to computer vision, I also worked on some small project in the course that I took like web scrapping, digital circuits etc.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

This is the first time that I came to USC and I’m deeply impressed by its architecture, atmosphere and people. The buildings have a very different style from those in the campus of China, seems to tell a long story about the school. People here are very friendly. They give us a warm welcome, leading us around campus, treating us with delicious food and answering every question patiently.

MCL is a great lab with wonderful atmosphere. Professor Kuo treat us with a wonderful meal and ask our interest specifically. And everyone is willing to help each other, discussing the project, answering every quesion when we are in need. I do have a great time in MCL.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I hope to make progess in the current project that I am working on and learn more about computer vision.

Welcome Summer Intern Student Po-Cheng Tseng

We are so happy to welcome a new summer intern student, Po-Cheng Tseng, in Summer 2017. Let us hear what he said about his research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

My name is Tseng, Po-Cheng , and I am currently a sophomore majoring in computer science in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. As a computer science student, I have had some internship experiences , which include, but not limited to ,web-scraping and writing websites, etc. Even though I currently only know very little about the field of artificial intelligence, I have been enamoured by the potential and the change that this field will bring about to the world, and it is always enjoyable to build something from scratch!

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

From the very moment that I stepped into the campus of USC, I have always felt an aura of perseverance and confidence around. Although USC does not boast the most beautiful buildings in the world, but everyone here is feverishly and relentlessly pursuing his or her goal, whether it be in the labs , on the track field or in the swimming pool.

MCL has always given me a vibe of friendliness and peacefulness, where everybody is willing to help each other when one encounters a problem. I love the symbiotic atmosphere created here!! I would like to give my special thanks to Eric, Sreedhar ,Alshivar and many others (I am not sure if I have spelt your names wrong haha) for showing me around upon my arrival here in the USC, and also Haqiang Wang , Wang Ye , for your generous help [...]

Welcome Summer Intern Student Jeffrey Maierhofer

We are so happy to welcome a new summer intern student, Jeffrey Maierhofer, in Summer 2017. Let us hear what he said about his research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

My name is Jeffrey “Matt” Maierhofer. I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder studying Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. In the past I have done some research in numerical solvers for complex differential equations. I am also interested in applications of mathematics that involve a heavy combination of computer science and mathematics.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

My first impression of USC was how beautiful the campus was. The weather has been wonderful, and the campus itself is really pleasing to walk through. MCL is by far the largest research group that I’ve ever been a part of, and i really like how it promotes collaboration within the lab.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I hope to learn as much as possible during my summer in MCL and hope to get to know a lot of cool people!

Welcome Summer Intern Student Derenik Haghverdian

We are so happy to welcome a new summer intern student, Derenik Haghverdian, in Summer 2017. Let us hear what he said about his research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

My name is Derenik Haghverdian. I am a rising senior at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) majoring in Applied Mathematics with a minor in Statistics. I am interested in the application of mathematics in solving ambitious questions and challenges. I have recently been engaged with machine learning and neural networks, and I see a great growth potential in this field.
I am also very passionate about photography, and I am a professional Flamenco guitar player.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

People at MCL were very welcoming and supportive of their new lab members. MCL is full of talented and ambitious individuals with strong academic and research backgrounds. I am honored to be a part of this great team and have the chance to learn and collaborate with them.

3. What’s your future expectation for MCL?

I want to develop a solid foundation in deep learning in my experience at MCL, so I can apply my knowledge and expertise to future projects in this field. I am confident that under the supervision of Professor Kuo and his amazing and professional team I will gain valuable experience in this field.

Welcome Summer Intern Student Sreedhar Radhakrishnan

We are so happy to welcome a new summer intern student, Sreedhar Radhakrishnan, in Summer 2017. Let us hear what he said about his research and MCL.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? (Previous research experience, project experience, research interest and expertise)

Hi, I am Sreedhar, I am currently an undergrad senior in Computer Science and Engineering at PES University,Bangalore,India and Data Science excites me. After my freshman year I interned at a research centre at my university where I was introduced to methodologies of research and I worked in the area of Computer Vision. The following year I had coursework in Design and Analysis of Algorithms and Linear Algebra which I fell in love with as I was able to get a perspective of how they are used in real world problems based on my research after my freshman year. The summer after sophomore year I worked on data analysis applied in the sport of Cricket and developed a player evaluation metric through the same. This really got me interested in leveraging the power of data in numerous applications. I then had course work in Data Analytics, Natural Language Processing, Digital Image Processing and Big Data which are some of my favorite courses. I am currently interested in Machine Learning and Deep Learning and their applications in various fields such as Computer Vision and NLP. I am currently working on Deep Learning for Computer Vision and learning a lot under the guidance of Dr. Kuo and fellow MCL members.

2. What’s your first impression of USC and MCL?

I just completed my first week of the summer internship here and I love the environment. Members of MCL are truly very hard working and dedicated in their [...]